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TORONTO — Sports can’t be scripted. They are the only true reality show on television.

Baseball, of all the majors, is the least predictable. Bad teams beat good teams all the time, eight players riding shotgun with a well-armed pitcher steering the wheel for three hours. The sport’s beauty is often lost in the monotony, a shortstop-to-first-base putout as mundane as pushing “send” on an e-mail.

It’s why Troy Tulowitzki’s loss stings. He is the car-chase scene in the movie, the moment when the plot makes sense, or at least the price of admission does.

Without Tulo, the Rockies are left with little chance to contend in the National League West. That’s the view of outsiders. A veteran NL scout told me Monday without hesitation, “They won’t survive.” The tendency is to believe him because Tulowitzki was having the best season of his career before cracking a rib on a diving stop of Ian Desmond’s groundball Thursday.

And then you watch left fielder Carlos Gonzalez, and it’s easy to understand why fans should never go to a baseball game in a hurry. Why do you want to get home when he might do something you’ve never seen before? He threw out a Philadelphia Phillies player from the warning track last weekend. It wasn’t Bo Jackson erasing Harold Reynolds with a 315-foot missile, but it was breathtaking nonetheless.

CarGo, who was named National League player of the week Monday, is the Larry Walker of the current Rockies.

Tulo is more valuable, because he plays a premium defensive position, but CarGo is more talented. Walker remains the yardstick by which all other Rockies are compared. He could run, hit for power, hit for average, throw and covered more ground than Lewis and Clark.

Sound familiar? That is CarGo. He can change a game with his feet, arm or a single swing. To tread water over the next six weeks, while Tulo is on the disabled list, the Rockies need excellence from starting pitchers Jorge De La Rosa, Jhoulys Chacin and Roy Oswalt. And not necessarily in that order.

But better starting pitching alone won’t do it. Without CarGo playing the part of an NL MVP candidate, the Rockies might as well be a Miss America contestant explaining the importance of financial gender equality through better education.

CarGo is the bold stroke that makes imaginations run wild. Without Tulo a year ago, he fell into a predictable trap. Gonzalez pressed, grew frustrated and ultimately felt sorry for himself as the team raced into oblivion. He was pitched to differently, and he struggled to adjust, never properly balancing patience with aggression.

A year later, he’s more prepared for the challenge and appears poised to put the team in the backpack he carries to the field. He married in the offseason, and adopted his wife’s son. His maturity was obvious on his first day of spring training when he showed up 20 pounds lighter, the product of intense winter speed and agility workouts. He was embarrassed how he finished last season, a shell of himself after the all-star break, hitting just five home runs while losing focus defensively.

Compare that performance to his response last weekend when his team’s balloon was leaking air after Tulo’s sobering injury Thursday afternoon. CarGo torched the Phillies, going 8-for-12 with a pair of doubles and two home runs. After belting just 22 home runs last year, Gonzalez has an NL-best 20 home runs. Of those, 11 are on the road, where he’s batting .336 with a .402 on-base percentage.

He lost the MVP award in 2010 because of the perception that the player nicknamed “Little Pony” was a one-trick pony, doing all of his damage at Coors Field.

He’s a better hitter now because he can handle sliders more effectively. Scouts insist he hits them as well as anyone in baseball. Why the Phillies chose to pitch him away is one of the season’s great mysteries. Gonzalez loves to drive the ball to the opposite field. The trick for him over the next six weeks is limiting those pitches he chases out of the strike zone.

It won’t take long before teams starting throwing him inside pitches regularly to set up the breaking ball in the dirt, especially the Nationals. Last summer, he flailed at that pitch. He won’t be an easy mark this time. He will trust cleanup hitter Michael Cuddyer and pass the baton when he’s clearly being pitched around.

And, he will learn from last year’s mistakes. There’s no one on the Rockies quite like CarGo. He can be Larry Walker, circa 1997, making 2013 still matter when Tulowitzki returns at the end of July.

Troy is a former Denver Broncos and Colorado Rockies beat writer for The Denver Post. He joined the news organization in 2002 as the Rockies' beat writer and became a Broncos beat writer in 2014 before assuming the lead role ahead of the 2015 season. He left The Post in 2015.

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